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Excavating Kafka by James Hawes In Excavating Kafka, the satirist James Hawes sets out to debunk the myths surrounding Franz Kafka. Writing in a style that swings between mock-epic (chapter titles begin "In which our hero...") and the stern tone of an admonishing schoolteacher, Hawes works through the latter stages of his subject's life proving that he wasn't the "tortured, quasi-saintly genius" that lecturers and tour guides say he was. To make his case, he invokes spades of historical context and, the book's much-trumpeted revelation, describes for the first time Kafka's hidden porn stash. Kafka, he shows us, was not an austere, oversensitive hypochondriac who feared publication, but a normal guy who was proud of being a successful author and, in his spare time, ogled bizarre exotic pornography. Although he sets out his argument convincingly enough, the problem is that his point - that Kafka "behaved simply in the way that